SALVOS SACKED ON NAURU

...while interpreters still side with the illegals on Christmas Is.

A Christmas Island resident has expressed disgust to The Pickering Post at how Salvation Army employees, supported by Iranian and Afghani interpreters, have been instructing arrivals on how to cheat the system. “It’s beyond belief how we are paying them to actually coach the illegal arrivals to circumvent Australian regulations”, he said.

The Left wing Guardian On-line has dishonestly reported how distressed Iranian “asylum seekers” had made the journey without sanitation and arrived covered in faeces.  “That’s simply not true said the resident”, who asked not to be named. “I’ve seen every boat arrive here and it seemed like most had been shopping at Harrods.

“Many women had bandages on their noses which we later found to have been nose jobs undergone en route in Malaysia. Some women had recent breast augmentations and had demanded mirrors so they could see how they looked.”

As reported here last week, the Salvos have been infiltrated by Green activists in Nauru who were advising male Tamil inmates on communal masturbation techniques. Since that report, the Government has cancelled The Salvation Army contract.

Illegal arrivals are being convinced to convert to Christianity (or at least to say they have) because the chances of being sent back home are far less if they can claim religious persecution.

Interpreters on Christmas Island are also telling women that their chances of getting to the Australian mainland are greater if they get pregnant.

“It’s a bloody joke”, said the Christmas Island informant. “This lot didn’t like the bloody toothpaste so a whole pallet load of Colgate was dumped in landfill and a new pallet of the preferred Macleans was flown in from Perth.  “They didn’t fancy cricket as a sport either (they had permission to use the local residents’ cricket ground) so they demanded hockey sticks. Canberra agreed and quickly despatched 40 hockey sticks.  "The trouble was that they were ice hockey sticks complete with a box of pucks.”

What is disturbing is that Green activists, operating as “Pink Salvos”, have undermined the good work the Salvos were doing. As a result they have suffered ignominious reputational damage and have been told their services are no longer required.

But most disturbing are the thousands of genuinely destitute refugees whose places are being taken by queue-jumping, well-heeled, illegal immigrants who are chauffeured around Jakarta airport duty-free shops before being escorted to smugglers’ boats, sans life jackets.

The loopy Greens, Gillard and Rudd have much to answer for

SOURCE





The Labor party's legacy of debt and destruction will hit us all

JOE Hockey must feel like a two-time victim of history.  When he was first elected to parliament in 1996, the Coalition had just inherited an economy and a budget in trouble.

Labor had left John Howard and Peter Costello facing a deficit of $8 billion and a trade imbalance that had racked up a foreign debt of around $180 billion.

At least Labor had left them with the tools to fix it - in the macro-economic and productivity reforms undertaken by Keating and Hawke.  They were also blessed to have stepped into government as the mining boom was about to get into full swing. They also still had big government assets to sell, such as Telstra.

Now, 17 years later, the Coalition has come to power claiming the burden of once again having to clean up a fiscal and economic mess left to them by a Labor government.

This task now falls to Hockey. And it is gargantuan.  The fundamental difference between the tasks given to Costello and Hockey is that while Gillard and Rudd may have left Hockey with the problems, the economic cycle is in reverse.

There are few if none of the high value assets left to sell.

And the next wave of reforms that were needed to set the budget up to handle it were left to chance, which should be recognised as a fundamental failure of the Rudd/Gillard government to make the same sort of “express declaratory policy”, as Paul Keating once described his reform agenda.

Instead they wound back workplace flexibility, re-regulated financial services, dragged the chain on free trade, re-regulated taxation policy and introduced 22,000 new regulations.

The simple storyline is that Australia has come to the end of its terms of trade boom with falling productivity and an impenetrable sea of regulation.  And the government has no money left to respond.

The perfect storm will come when all these factors converge with the ageing population and a declining tax base.

For people who can’t make sense of all the numbers that the government has thrown around this week to drill home the point that the country is in for a period of pain, Reserve Bank boss Glenn Stevens provided words that anyone should easily understand.

We are all going to have to change the way we think about government. It can no longer pay for the things people have come to expect them to.

Most Australians would have become familiar with the term “underlying structural deficit”. It is a problem in the budget that has been talked about for at least the past decade, although it started long before that.  But it is now coming home to roost.

Both Labor and the Coalition government before it are to blame for it.  The social spending and middle-class welfare that began under Howard and accelerated under Labor has become unsustainable.

Hockey knows that this will be politically difficult to unwind. His success ultimately can only be measured in levels of unpopularity.

The biggest drag on the economy over the next three years will be a lack of political will - and bipartisanship - to get it done.

This week’s mid-year budget update was as much a political manifesto for the Coalition as a financial record of the state of the nation.

With only a few days to Christmas, Hockey’s fear will be that its message will be lost over summer.  So in case you weren’t listening, this is the message that the Treasurer wants Australians to take to Christmas:

"People are going to have to start taking personal responsibility for their lives."

This will come as a shock to an entire generation of Australians who have never experienced rising unemployment.  But the culture of government bailing people out is over.

If this wasn’t clear enough in the attitude that it has taken to Holden, Qantas and SPC, it will become blindingly apparent when it starts hacking into the transfer payments system.

The changes to come that Hockey was trying to soften the nation up for this week will require a dramatic cultural change in Australia.

And it is as blunt as this: government will not be there to help us out.

SOURCE






Racist Muslim spokesman loses defamation case against radio station

The report below is from 4 years ago.  I report it here because Trad has just lost his final appeal against the judgment.  He will be up for hundreds of thousands of legal costs but the Lakemba mosque will no doubt help with that



KEYSAR Trad, the longtime spokesman for Muslim cleric Sheik Taj bin al-Hilaly, has been described as "racist" and "offensive" by a judge who today rejected his defamation claim against radio station 2GB.

Mr Trad sued the top-rating Sydney station in the NSW Supreme Court after presenter Jason Morrison described him "gutless" and " just trouble" for his conduct at a rally after the Cronulla riots in December 2005, The Australian reported.

Mr Trad's comment about the "shame of tabloid journalism' caused the crowd to boo and harass a 2GB journalist near the stage.

The reporter told Mr Morrison he feared for his safety, prompting the presenter to deliver his tirade the following morning, in which he also described Mr Trad as "disgraceful and dangerous individual who incited violence, hatred and racism."

In August 2007, a jury found Mr Morrison had defamed Mr Trad but Justice Peter McClellan found for 2GB in the second - or defence - phase of the trial that was heard in May, saying the statement were true and also protected as comment based on fact.

"There is little doubt that many of the plaintiff's remarks are offensive to Jewish persons and homosexuals," Justice McClellan said in his judgment.

"Many of his remarks are distasteful and appear to condone violence.   "I'm satisfied that the plaintiff does hold views which can properly be described as racist. "I'm also satisfied that he encourages others to hold those views. In particular he holds views derogatory of Jewish people.

"The views which he holds would not be acceptable to most right-thinking Australians."

Mr Trad, who founded the Islamic Friendship Association, faces up to $400,000 in court costs and there are question marks over his credibility after Justice McClellan's scathing judgment.

During the trial he was subjected to close scrutiny about his public profile as Sheik Hilaly's right-hand man and he frequent statements he made to "clarify" the controversial views of the cleric.

These included comments that women who dressed provocatively were "uncovered meat" inviting the attention of rapists.

Mr Trad suggested Hilaly was "talking about people who engage in extramarital sex."

Neither Mr Trad or Mr Morrison were at Sydney's Supreme Court to hear the judgment.  Outside court, a representative for Mr Trad said he planned to appeal.

SOURCE






Human rights narcissism: time for the axe

In recent days, there have been two appalling mob-frenzy attacks on Twitter, one attacking a young American woman, Justine Sacco, who was sacked from her job as a result of a single inept, mis-interpreted tweet. The other was an American reality TV star, Phil Robertson, of Duck Dynasty, for criticising homosexuality, while at the same time saying people should treat gays with kindness. He has been suspended by his network, A&E.

Free speech has never been more contested terrain. It does not help that there is a creeping rise of more bureaucracy, more direction, more codes and more compunction that are, by their very nature, an intrusion by the state into the lives of its citizens. Look no further than the scorching of Tim Wilson for having been appointed a Human Rights Commissioner last week, as if a libertarian has no place in the culture of human rights.

In a caustic analysis in Saturday's Herald of how Wilson, the director of policy at the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne, was appointed a commissioner, someone at the Human Rights Commission was quick to smear Wilson, anonymously:

"He has got no relevant qualifications at all. He has been a climate change denier, has done no law, little policy, he has an arts degree and a masters in something but he had no technical qualifications in this field at all. I would say most of the staff are better qualified than Tim is."

Meow. Anonymous quotes are the most dubious tool in the journalist's toolbox as there's so little accountability. I avoid them and use them sparingly. When journalists quote sources inside the bureaucracy or government it is nearly always near the top of the organisation because these are the people journalists deal with.

So this smear gets to the core of what is wrong with the Human Rights Commission and why the Attorney-General, George Brandis, is naive to think that by appointing a libertarian like Wilson, who is also gay, he is going to start to turn this deeply, slyly ideological organisation around. It is implacable.

In the last financial year, the commission spent $33.6 million running itself. Looking at the highlights in its latest annual report, the commission did some good work but nothing that could not be handled by a division of the Attorney-General's Department. It also did a great deal of make-work. It is clearly a bureaucracy in search of relevance.

The annual report, like the smear on Wilson, reflects the institutional narcissism of the commission, which exhibits the same characteristics of the individual functional narcissist:

1. An overdeveloped sense of one's unique worth.

2. An ability to talk a good game and elicit support.

3. An ability to express sympathy, but not empathy.

4. A deep self-absorption, masked by 1, 2 and 3.

5. Highly critical of others.

6. Yet easily aggrieved when criticised.

7. Incapable of taking blame.

Having observed the actions of human rights commissioners for more than 20 years, I believe Australia would be better served if the Australian Human Rights Commission Act 1986 was repealed and the commission disbanded. Even such complete liquidation would not compensate for the commission's role in facilitating the greatest calumny ever made against Australia: that Australian governments committed genocide against the Aborigines. When this claim was tested in the courts it disintegrated. The commission has never paid a price for this divisive, corrosive and counterproductive lie. Like all narcissists, it cannot even see what it did wrong, let alone admit it or atone.

The Wilson gesture will probably prove to be a sideshow. With the new government facing a debt and deficit mountain, it should be taking a chainsaw to redundant bureaucracies and redundant laws. But that would require real steel, and Brandis, by tinkering, has just shown it is not there.

SOURCE